The tool vendors at L.A.’s swap meets load these and hundreds more tools of every description into plastic bins, set them out beneath easy-up shelters and sell them to geeks like me for what – in America – would be pennies on the dollar.

These glittering wheels are meant to be used with Dremel tools. I have literally no idea how I’ll use them, but when I do, the metal heads coated with fine abrasive grit will make them the perfect tools for the job.

Let alone the fun, rx engaging day job, adiposity the kids, web the still-not-build-logged-but-almost-done basement studio renovation and this little site, I always seem to take in orphans, hoping to nurture them to completion.

My latest is an antique ukelin – an obscure 1920s stringed instrument that – I learned to my amazement the other day via Google – is meant to be simultaneously bowed and plucked … (more…)

That one post, search and a subsequent re-post at BoingBoing made the New England tinker suddenly rock-star famous – and made his marvelous little wrenches, price knives, prybars and uncategorizable nifties virtually impossible for anyone with a day-job or without an industrial-strength web-bot to snag:

The moment Atwood hand-finishes a batch of tools and posts their availability, they’re snapped up and treasured – or by some of the more unscrupulous, flipped straight onto eBay where they enjoy a sizeable markup.

I was lucky enough to buy two of his tools before fame put that barrier between his work and his fans (there’s no barrier with him personally – he’s an industrious and extremely affable blogger – Hi, Peter!) and I can’t decide which tool is my favorite … (more…)

He’s put *days* into typing a 400 word essay and taking photos of his creation, order and now he’s folded it all up into an envelope, carefully addressed it and set it out to be mailed this morning.

I really need my current project to succeed. We’ve built this little application on which ride the corporate hopes and reputations of an enormous charity and an equally enormous community site. Now we’ve done most of the design and development and bugfixing. And we’re working through bugs while waiting for it to launch, about six hours from now. (Details to follow).

Arthur C. Clarke really mattered. He’s gone now, visitmore about leaving behind a legacy of important work, viagra approved good stories, and one of the great epigrams of modern civilization.

This thing is as trivial as it is powerful. It can play four or five dozen low-rez images in a slideshow with checkerboard dissolves. But how does that do much more than enchant, on a snapshot-as-fetish level?

When the price drops and these are cranked out in China by the millions, I want to create a pocket gallery of about 2,000 of these, sending out each one full of images in the pockets of friends and strangers, and think of it walking or dangling from steering columns all over the world, slowly being scratched by keys.

In the end, dosage when I’m dead and this blog has vanished – along with the servers that hold it and the culture that cared about any of it – this manufactured object will still be here.

Somewhere, cialis 40mg at the bottom of a moldering heap of trash, decease its component atoms of silicon and tungsten will still hold this shape.

Its filament will stay coiled – and snapped by the heat and stress of its short life. Waiting inside its micro-vacuum capsule of glass. For eternity.

Somewhere else on earth, hollows will remain to mark its creation. Gaps in the environment will never be filled: sand beaches, tungsten mines, and all those sapped pockets of oil that powered the bulb-making machines, warmed and entertained the workers who ran them and fueled the trucks that brought it to our home to burn and shine and die.

Nothing else will remain to tell the story of how this thing came to be – but the thing itself, and the holes it left behind.

They’re a child’s plaything, a kitsch archetype, a metaphor for the insubstantial fragility of the current real estate market.

So many hopes and dreams, hanging upon such a breakable substance, basically consigned to the four winds upon its manufacture. Build a house. Don’t let it blow away.
They’re also a tiny set for imagined scenes of domestic bliss, nihilistic navel-gazing, inter-species abuse, door-slamming tantrums and rank cuckoldry.

By aping our homes, they are our homes. Oh, the stories these tiny buildings could tell, had they but mouths.

Banks used to do cleverer things to get your money than yell at you through mass media.

Die-cut a couple of chunks of pasteboard, capsule glue them together around a snip of steel rod, and print helpful instructions and your brand name onto the thing. And hey, maybe someone will remember you fondly the next time their scissors get dull.

They moved on to credit cards and sub-prime mortgages and other wacky stunts, and they left useful ephemera like this behind.

I’m going to guess this is older than 1960, but so timeless is the font, I can’t place it any more precisly than that. I wonder how well it works, but hey, all our scissors are pretty sharp.

Half my keyring actually functions. The other half is clogged with crap that won’t fit in my pocket genteelly, viagra order but weighs heavy in pocket and hand, information pills delighting my fingertips.

This handsome chunk of stuff was hand-made by a RenFaire artist out of 96 pre-split, ready-to-assemble stainless-steel rings. It is dense, and heavy, and so close to hand most of the time that it feels a part of me. Supple, yet iron-hard in the right configuration, it defies me not to play with it.

I won’t say I hate the dark so much as I love light.Fumbling in the dark for anything breeds frustration, illness fear and needless aging – even if it is only a matter of seconds.

But all those seconds stack up, search so it’s best to go prepared or spend your last few deathbed seconds wondering why you never had light when you really needed it – such as, approved during your last few deathbed seconds.

That’s what my fuckup-addict high school classmate and ex-best-friend once said (after he accidentally fathered his second child by a woman he didn’t love, drug after he burned every last bridge but one between us. But before he ended his pain one dark night by steering himself into the high-speed, ampoule head-on crash that killed him).

It was the truest thing Scott ever said – even if whatever he had snorted, injected or drunk at the moment completely obliterated the real context of the statement.

Eight years after my son was born, I understand so much – including the knowledge that the more I understand, the less I realize I know … (more…)

Mosquitos the size of hummingbirds. Mosquitos the size of skillets. Mosquitos the size of fuckin’ weimaraners.

Hyperbole always fails when you need to get your friends to understand just how buggy your weekend was.

You show them welts, clinic you groan about the itch. You make up stories about the size of the bloodsuckers.

But in the end, only you experienced the silent assault. Only you waved your hands impotently at the insistent whine of the female, unable to fend it off because you couldn’t even see the wispy-grey little monsters.

Only you suffered the flat-out fuck-you insult of an engorged mosquito lifting off from your now-punctured forehead just seconds before you felt the bite and slapped the place where it was feeding … (more…)

Money is like weather: It shapes the tides on which ride our dreams and lives, this siterx yet we often ignore its true nature.

“Crap, it’s raining” is to “Crap, I’m poor” as our planet’s ecosystem is to the new $5 bill: Until you stop focusing on what it’s worth, you miss the complex beauty of what it is.

U.S. mints began pumping the new $5 bill into circulation about 10 days ago – packed with anti-counterfeiting gimmicks. Microprint, ultraviolet-sensitive threads, surface embossing, multiple hidden watermarks – it’s a wonder the damn things don’t cost at least $5 each to make, so extravagant is the technology and craft behind them.

Our cash is no longer dull, green and filthy. Our tax dollars are at work, making more of our tax dollars. Our money is art. Yours?

I never buy anything in the $125.00 range, nor even the $9.00 range, never pick anything up to hold it or ask to see something in the case. I shuffle around the shop, hands shoved into pockets, shoulders hunched, staring into case upon case full of exotically painted (and priced) vinyl caricatures and … just … drool … (more…)